The next day, before I’d even finished my coffee, the phone rang, and it was not my phone. It was in my purse on the kitchen chair and it was not mine.
Room 419. A woman named Corinne Stoddard had been moved down to intensive care in a hurry Tuesday evening, and when a patient gets moved in a hurry the drawer gets missed, and there was a cell phone in it, dead, with a picture of two dogs on the case.
I found it at one in the morning. I put it in my pocket to walk down to the switchboard at the end of my shift, and I plugged it into the charger at the housekeeping desk on the way past, because a dead phone can’t be given back to anybody.
I never got to the end of my shift.
And when that supervisor stood in the hall with her hand out for my keys, I had a stranger’s telephone in my coat and did not mention it, because she had already decided what kind of woman I was and I did not feel like arguing with a decision.
It woke up on my kitchen table at seven-forty in the morning. Her son, in Amarillo, calling for the ninth time in two days.
I drove it back myself and handed it to the ICU desk in my own clothes.
The fifty dollars had never left the building either. Mrs. Stoddard’s supper tray went down with two twenties and a ten folded under the plate, where she had put them so the aide wouldn’t see and refuse them.
And every tray in that hospital has a card in the slot with a room number on it, and dietary scans that card on the way out and again on the return line, because that’s how they run counts. The kitchen’s lost-and-found is a plastic bin under the dish machine and it is emptied on Fridays.
Fifty dollars, in a bin, eleven feet from the dish line, since Tuesday. One phone call to dietary would have found it. Nobody made one.
Corinne Stoddard came off the ventilator in March. Her son wrote to the hospital board and to the paper, and I have not read either one of those letters all the way through and I don’t intend to.
What I did read was the note she sent me herself in April, on the kind of stationery you buy at a drugstore, in handwriting that goes uphill:
“They tell me you had my telephone in your purse the whole time they were calling you a thief. I have been trying for two weeks to understand a woman who would do that and I have decided I don’t need to. I just need to say thank you.”
They asked me back in an open meeting with both shifts in the room, and the supervisor apologized, and I took it.
I asked for one thing. There’s a laminated card at every housekeeping desk now that says where to call if you find something at two in the morning, so the next woman doesn’t have to carry it out in her coat and hope.